by Ian W. Toll
The heavy round shot was the standard ammunition, and its main advantage was its ability to concentrate the force of the weapon on a single point. It was useful for smashing a hole in the enemy’s hull at the waterline, for example; this might cause seawater to pour in, slowing the ship down, impairing her ability to maneuver, drawing her men away from the fight to man the pumps, and eventually even sinking her. If aimed high, it might cause a mast to fall, or knock away a few yards, bringing down the enemy’s sails and preventing the vessel from running away. But the British were generally content to simply fire on the level, directly at the opposing ship’s gun deck, where her gun crews worked. The heavy iron shot might pierce the hull and maul the men working on the other side. When fired on a lighter ship, a shot might penetrate “through and through,” passing all the way through both sides of the ship and disappearing into the ocean on the far side. If the enemy’s hull was strong enough to stop the ball, an eruption of splinters on the inside wall would mutilate any men working within a 10- or 15-foot radius. So great was the force of the big naval guns that surgeons swore they had seen men killed by the wind of a passing shot; on examination, their corpses were found to be completely unmarked. But when a cannon scored a direct hit on a man, it did not leave a pretty picture. It was not at all uncommon for a ball to blow a man’s head off, splattering his mates with blood and brains and tiny fragments of bone and tissue. Men had their hands or arms taken cleanly off by passing balls. One sailor recalled seeing the top half of another man’s head cut off by a round shot. He was surprised at how neat and symmetrical the wound was, as if someone had swung a very sharp broadax in a wide horizontal arc and struck the unlucky man on the bridge of his nose. Both earlobes had been left on his lower cheeks.
Abovedecks, the British ships were armed with carronades, named for the town of Carron, Scotland, where they were first cast. The carronade was a kind of snub-nose cannon, shorter and lighter than the long gun. Because it was lighter, it could be carried high above the waterline and fired and reloaded more rapidly. The carronade was not effective at long range, but in the close action favored by the British captains it was deadly. The French, who bore the brunt of their immense destructive power, called them “devil guns.” The largest carronades were bored for enormous 68-pound balls that required 5.5-pound cartridges of gunpowder to fire. But they were most pernicious when loaded with shrapnel-like types of ammunition such as grape or canister shot. Grape shot were fist-sized iron balls bound in canvas bags that blew apart when fired. Canister shot were cylindrical cases containing pistol balls that became a kind of airborne Claymore mine as they were fired. There was also chain shot and bar shot, both designed to cut up the enemy’s rigging, but both equally capable of cutting a man in half. Before being fired, they were sometimes heated in the galley fires until they glowed bright orange. In the tops, the platforms positioned high on the masts, the marines would fire down onto the enemy decks with their smooth-bored rifles and muskets. Their objective was to kill the officers—to break down the command structure and send their crews into confusion. If a ship did not surrender after being battered by the British long guns, carronades, and snipers, the officers gave the order to “board and carry her.” A swarm of seamen, often with their faces blackened with soot to horrify the enemy, leapt across to the enemy deck armed with cutlasses, boarding pikes, axes, swords, and pistols, and slaughtered any man who dared to resist.
The point-blank engagements favored by Nelson and his fellow officers were horribly destructive, but they left Britain’s enemies—and France especially—not only beaten on the sea but utterly demoralized. England held its enemies under a spell of invincibility that seemed to preordain the result of every battle. In the days before Trafalgar, the French and Spanish officers in the combined fleet were gloomy and pessimistic. Many favored remaining in the safety of the harbor at Cadiz, where at least the fleet would be preserved. They put to sea because they had no choice. In August 1805, Napoleon had demanded that his fleet win command of the English Channel long enough for France’s armies to mount an invasion of England. His orders were direct and unambiguous: “Sail; do not lose a moment; enter the Channel with my assembled squadrons; England is ours.” When they hesitated, the emperor came close to calling his admirals a pack of traitors and cowards. Their goal was not even to win, but to lose honorably, to prove to themselves and the world that they could still fight bravely. They sailed into a desperate battle against a more powerful foe, knowing they would be not only beaten but annihilated.
The battle was fought exactly as Nelson had wished. His flagship, Victory, engaged the French flagship so closely that when the guns were run out, they came into contact with the enemy hull. Victory’s officers were concerned that the fire from their guns would engulf both ships in flames. To prevent this, a man at each gun threw buckets of water into the holes made in the enemy’s side by each shot. One officer aboard the Victory recalled the scene: “There was fire from above, fire from below…the guns recoiling with violence, reports louder than thunder, the decks heaving and the sides straining. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, where every man appeared a devil. Lips might move, but orders and hearing were out of the question: everything was done by signs.” A sailor stationed on the lower decks of the 110-gun Royal Sovereign told his “Honoured Father” that he felt fortunate in having lost only three fingers in the battle. “How my fingers got knocked overboard I don’t know,” he confessed; “but off they are, and I never missed them till I wanted them.”
The victory of the British fleet at Trafalgar was perhaps the most decisive in naval history. Eighteen French and Spanish ships were captured or destroyed. Six thousand French and Spanish sailors were killed or wounded, and twenty thousand taken prisoner. British casualties amounted to 1,700; and the Royal Navy did not lose a single ship. Napoleon, after Trafalgar, was forced to admit that he could never hope to lead an invasion of England. He turned his energies to the east, to military conquest by land, a path that would eventually end with his disastrous invasion of Russia and his final defeat a decade later at Waterloo.
Nelson’s officers urged him not to wear his medals and orders and full-dress admiral’s uniform while exposed on the Victory’s quarterdeck. He turned a deaf ear to their pleas. Almost at the same moment Victory broke the enemy line, he was shot through the chest by an enemy sniper. When the doctor rushed to his side, Nelson declared the wound to be mortal and rejected any further medical attention. He asked his flag captain to kiss him as he lay dying. He asked to be remembered to Emma and Horatia. “I have done my duty,” he said at last, “thank God for that.” In England, news of the British victory and the death of Nelson arrived simultaneously. Joy over the victory was swamped by the outpouring of mass grieving at the loss of the beloved admiral. “The only signs of a great victory,” remarked a Londoner, “are endless posters saying ‘alas, poor Nelson.’” A foreign visitor wrote: “It was as if a great calamity had befallen the land.” The sailors of the navy were “useless for duty for days,” wrote one seaman. “Chaps that fought like the devil sat down and cried like wenches.”
For three days, Nelson’s body lay in state at Greenwich, in a casket carved from the mainmast of the French battleship Orient, viewed by thirty thousand mourners who passed in long, hushed queues. On January 8, 1806, the body was taken up the Thames on a funeral barge, followed by a procession of vessels two miles long, to Whitehall Stairs in London. A vast funeral pageant carried him into the nave at St. Paul’s, where the great dome overhead was lit by the spectral glow of several thousand candles. Forty-eight sailors from the Victory carried the flagship’s ensign. A scuffle broke out between them at the cathedral door; the flag was torn to pieces and each man ran off with a fragment of red, white, or blue.
Before the slain hero was lowered into the crypt and sealed in his sarcophagus, the mourners sang the patriotic anthem that was always sung on such occasions—“Rule, Britannia.” And what did Britannia, that “Blest Isle, with
matchless beauty crown’d,” rule? “Britannia rules the waves,” answered the refrain, and therefore, “Britons never, never, never will be slaves.” Though the words had been written before he was born, “Rule, Britannia” was Nelson’s song—or rather, he had made it his own. The words that had once been merely rhetorical were now made literally true by the man they were laying to rest.
THE, ANN ALEXANDER an American square-rigged merchantman with a cargo of flour, tobacco, salt fish, and apples, was eighteen days out of New York when she met the British fleet off Trafalgar a few hours after its victory. That there had been an enormously destructive battle was apparent from the sea-litter floating across many miles of the ocean. Bobbing on the surface were huge sections of spars and rigging, torn pieces of sailcloth, and dead seamen who would soon slip beneath the waves. Nelson was already dead and embalmed. His head had been shorn, his arms and legs folded in a fetal position, and his body sealed head-down in a cask of brandy, camphor, and myrrh. Most of the British ships were still too battered to sail, and their uninjured crews were working to repair the damage while also caring for hundreds of wounded British sailors and thousands of wounded French and Spanish prisoners. A boat from the Victory came across to the Ann to inquire if any stores could be purchased to aid in the repairwork. As luck would have it, Ann was carrying a deckload of lumber, which her master was happy to sell, along with some flour and apples. He received a fair price and was paid in English gold.
It was a minor footnote to the Battle of Trafalgar, and not a significant event in itself. But it was typical of the presence of the Americans on the sea in those years. Merchant vessels sailing under the Stars and Stripes were ubiquitous on the high seas, but rarely was an American warship ever seen. The first three American presidents—Washington, Adams, and Jefferson—had gone to great lengths to stay out of the conflict raging in Europe. The only exception had been a brief, undeclared naval war with France in the Caribbean a few years earlier, but that was a small-scale, regional conflict, fought more against French privateers than against the French navy, and it had come to a quick, negotiated end. The truth was that America did not want war, least of all a sea war, because its merchant marine was making money hand over fist in the “carrying trade,” a role it could continue to exploit only so long as its government remained neutral.
In 1805, the United States was not much more than a narrow strip of sparsely populated beachfront real estate. In time the west would open up, and its receding frontier would lure millions away from the coast. But in the opening decade of the nineteenth century, the lands beyond the Appalachians were remote, little known, poor, and dangerous. Half of the country’s 6 million inhabitants lived within a day’s journey of the vast, gray, tumultuous ocean to the east—an ocean that served both as a defensive barrier against the rest of the world and as a highway to it. Centers of population were strung out along the coastline like a chain of islands, enclosed on one side by the sea and on the other by a sea of woods. Roads were roads only in name—they were tentative wagon tracks through a seemingly interminable wilderness, and when not awash in mud they were everywhere obstructed by stumps and fallen trees. Coach and wagon drivers were constantly stopping and descending from the driver’s seat, ax in hand. Every stream crossing was an adventure; every river was impassable when the ferryman was drunk or in bed. Travelers were happy to put twenty miles behind them without losing their way in the woods.
The biggest American towns—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore—were all Atlantic seaports, with large communities of professional seamen and all the essential supporting industries needed to build, fit out, provision, and repair ships. In every town, the waterfront was a maze of warehouses, ropewalks, boatbuilders’ sheds, countinghouses, and sail lofts. The shipyards drew from a broad pool of expert laborers and master craftsmen, including carpenters, caulkers, joiners, painters, sparmakers, woodcarvers, coopers, ropemakers, smiths, and sailmakers. Shipwrights used crude hand tools and manually operated wooden lathes to turn out masts, spars, bowsprits, tops, and blocks. Planking was sawed, steamed, shaped, and fitted by skilled craftsmen using adzes, broadaxes, and planes. No precision instruments then existed, but a skilled hewer could lift a broadax and split a piece of timber precisely along a pencil line. Shipyard workers worked from sunrise to sunset, six days a week, and were paid the same daily wage in the long days of June as they were during the shorter days of the fall and winter months. All day long, the yards were filled with the sounds of saw, adze, broadax, and caulking mallet sawing and chipping and tapping away at the timbers. Day after day, all up and down the coast, newly built ships rumbled down the ways and plunged into the sea. Every launch of a new ship made room on the stocks for a new keel to be laid.
Fast little fore- and aft-rigged Baltimore schooners ran the English blockades into French, Dutch, and German ports, carrying grain, flour, kiln-dried corn in barrels, dried fish, salted meats, rice, cheese, and other foodstuffs to feed the war-torn Continent. Big square-rigged blue-water sailors out of Salem and Boston rounded the Cape of Good Hope bound for the East Indies, or chanced the grueling passage round Cape Horn to the South Pacific and on to Whampoa Roads and the burgeoning China trade. American ships were seen taking on pepper in Sumatra; tea, coffee, silks, and spices in China; ivory and sandalwood and strange, beautiful lacquer boxes in Malaysia. Weather-beaten whaling ships out of Nantucket and New Bedford were seen north of the Arctic Circle and deep in the heart of the South Pacific. The sailing stock-yards of New England and Pennsylvania shipped cargoes of oxen, sheep, cattle, horses, and swine along with an abundant supply of shovels. In a gale the terrified animals were apt to be injured or killed and would have to be swayed up through the hatchways and heaved over the side.
New York merchantmen rode every tide down the Narrows, outbound for Caribbean destinations, laden with flour, salmon, brandy, dried hams, barrels of salted pork and beef, peas, candles, soap, pots of butter, herring, claret, glassware, oil, juniper berries, cheese, indigo, spruce and hickory hoops. They might return home with rum, coffee, sugar, pimento, molasses, and muscovado; or they might continue on the long, stormy transatlantic run to Europe. Drab little sloops, brigs, snows, cutters, ketches, and other rigs for the coastal trade sailed out of Portsmouth, Newburyport, Ipswich, Bristol, New London, Baltimore, Charleston, and a hundred other American seaports. They were laden with sugar, flour, cotton, rice, corn, tea, sausages, almonds, sweetmeats, earthenware, varnish, pig iron, oak staves, liquor, shoes, tanned leather, looking glasses, playing cards, books, perfumes, hair powder, and a thousand other cargoes.
A Marylander marveled at the number of American ships and sailors he encountered in the West Indies, where Europe’s sugar colonies subsisted largely on foodstuffs imported from the United States. “When I see our numerous fleets constantly passing these islands, it looks as if our vessels sprung out of the forests, ready equipped,” he remarked—“and…like Cadmus’s soldiers, the men seem to spring up out of the ocean instead of the earth.”
From the American merchantman’s point of view, Napoleon’s world war made the seas far more hazardous, but at the same time rendered them far more lucrative. So long as the United States avoided being dragged into the war, its merchant marine would reap windfall profits. The disparities between prices of goods in different ports widened; a barrel of flour that cost $8 in New York might be sold for $18 in Amsterdam; a bale of cotton that cost $11 in Savanna might fetch $23 in Brest. The wider the price spreads, the more fantastic the profits. With every other major maritime nation at war, competition fell off drastically. Ships sailing under the colors of the warring nations were subject to immediate capture by their enemies, and neutral ships became the safest means of importing and exporting goods that might otherwise never reach their destinations. American neutrality was big business: it set off an explosion in American exports, shipping tonnage, and overseas commerce. As Napoleon made his bid for mastery of the Old World, the good times were rolling in the new one.
Merchants, shipowners, and sea captains found that it was easier to make money than ever before. A 250-ton merchantman—a ship with the capacity of about six modern ocean cargo containers—would cost $15,000 to $20,000 to build, fit out, and provision. One successful voyage in the war years would clear that much in profit for the owners. When a single six-month voyage would pay for an asset with a useful life of twenty years, the economic incentives driving men to trade on the sea were irresistible. Merchants built handsome, columned Georgian mansions, comfortable and airy but not ostentatious, their grounds demarcated by discreet black wrought-iron fences. Their offices were in countinghouses near the wharves, second-story rooms whose windows were blocked with heavy drapes; rooms with deep, musty chairs and couches that smelled of brandy and cigars. They surrounded themselves with charts, globes, oil paintings, model ships, and curiosities from distant parts of the world. Their heavy walnut desks were piled with paperwork and their shelves lined with ledger books. Had they wished, these men could have gone out and thrown fistfuls of gold coins into the street. Money washed into port as predictably and relentlessly as the incoming tide. Every returning ship brought another payday, and at the height of the season, in summer and early fall, 250 ships entered American seaports every day.
No one had any illusions. Business was booming because Europe was at war, and for no other reason. Peace would bring an end to the boom; so would an end to American neutrality. One New York merchant had shown his hand in 1787, two years before the French Revolution and five years before war broke out in Europe. He had written to a West Indian business partner: “Should a war (O, horrid war!) take place between Great Britain and France, will not your ports be open to us, and our commerce with you as neutrals be an object of consideration?” From the outbreak of war in 1792 to 1807, two years after Trafalgar, American exports (and re-exports) more than quintupled, to $108 million per year. They would not touch that level again until 1835, when the nation’s population had more than doubled. In the same fifteen-year period the size of America’s merchant marine nearly tripled, to well over 1 million metric tons—more than 10,000 vessels, manned by about 69,000 seamen. This did not include the untold numbers of “tramp traders”—American vessels that plied the waters between foreign ports without ever returning home. Flour exports alone would fill four hundred ships a year. In active tonnage and cargoes, the United States—a small country, and isolated—had surpassed every other maritime power save Great Britain. And if the trend held, as it might, the United States—with no colonial empire and no navy to speak of—would overtake Britain as the nation with the largest merchant shipping fleet in the world.